The shifty-looking middle aged man with the fixed smile, outside the High Court in Glasgow today on the arm of his loyal wife, cut a despicable figure. Found guilty of perjury, few but his most mindless supporters can now seriously believe in his innocence. But it is not his perjury – in the course of suing the Murdoch press – that should bother socialists. It is the vanity, arrogance and hypocrisy that lay behind the perjury that should concern us.

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Sheridan, who liked to portray himself as a clean-living fellow, was exposed in the News of the World as a frequenter of a sex club. He admitted his mistake to his comrades on the executive of his then-organisation the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), but then announced that he intended to sue the News of the World and that he expected his comrades to lie for him. Such arrogance succeeded in destroying the SSP and alienating friends and comrades of twenty years.

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But for a while it looked like he’d got away with it: he won his action and was awarded £200,000. But significantly, it was former close friends and comrades who helped the News of the World and the police hit back with the perjury case.

Sheridan’s reckless destruction of the SSP and his arrogant demand that comrades must lie for him, was born of a terrible culture of hero-worship and personality-cultism on the left. After his 2006 victory over the News of the World he stood down as an MSP and started appearing on chat shows and things like Celebrity Big Brother (for a reported fee of £100,000). Increasingly he came to resemble another vain fake-left, George Galloway. It’s surely no coincidence that Galloway has been one of Sheridan’s staunchest supporters.

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But unlike the charlatan Galloway, Tommy Sheridan was once a brave and principled socialist. The young militant pictured above defying the poll tax was an admirable figure. He served six months for his anti-poll tax activity and was jailed again for campaigning against the nuclear fleet at Faslane. The ex-socialist Sheridan now faces jail in a much less noble cause. We prefer to remember the young militant before the trappings of minor celebrity and a taste for the good life turned him into the creature that emerged from the court today.

170.This website is absolutely disgusting now. You seriously need to get a handle on this, Andy Newman. Regardless of your flip flop of opinions on Sheridan and the SSP, you surely must see how appalling and ridiculous this has become, all being played out by vicious idiots on your blog.

Comment by Sarah — 24 December, 2010 @ 8:51 pm

171.in the interests of seasonal good will, I am shutting this down now.

baldricsaid,

tOMMY,he!s a gonner,silly lad shoudnie lie to the judge.Could argue fuck the law, its a wealth and status protection instrument,then again his peers some prolatariat found him guilty.

Wealth deviance and decadence, i think was Tommy!s,downfall.Hoisted by the same petard that he fough against all his socialist life.Pity not for him,but for the Party that he aided in founding the S.S.P.only by nothing more than ego to follow with Solidarity.

What is it they say you can fool a fool sometimes,but not all the time.R.I.P tOMMMY.

Dear John Game: enjoy Christmas day, did you? So glad you found some time off from the festivities to comment here.

If I understand your point correctly, it’s this: once someone has worked out which side of any issue they have to be on (using the SWP-anti-imperialism-ometre), they then have to lie and cheat accordingly. That seems to be it, eh? It’s certainly the position of your comrade Seymour, here:

Btw, Gameboy, I am aware that the *real* Lenin (as opposed to that petty bourgeois tosser Seymour) was not against lying and cheating ‘per se’:“We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class … We do not believe in an eternal morality.”
But note that Lenin was talking about lying to the class enemy…in the interest of the revolution…NOT lying about your sex life to your own comrades, in the interest of saving face and/or making a few bob.

So Tommy Sheridan lied to screw twenty grand out of Rupert Murdoch! Well good on him. As a practising Christian (ie practising every day in the hope I’ll get it right eventually) I say that if you’re not prepared to lie and break any or all of the commandments to help establish the Kingdom on earth, then you’re just playing at being a revolutionary and there is no health in you.
Of course, Sheridan sounds like something of a fuck-up, personally. Well, join the club, mate. Let he who is without sin, etc. Fortunately, my own peccadilloes are so well known by all the people who love and hate me, that I am immune to blackmail or calumny.
I’d rather be a fuck-up than whited sepulchre. When I read some of the priggish postings to this blog I wonder why I bother to read them. But then I remember to identify with the stuff that makes me so cross. Do I sound so self-righteous? Answers on a postcard, please.
Have a Happy New Year, all the same. Happy Hanukah, Merry Christmas, Eid Maburak, and so on.
As W.H. Auden said, we must love one another, or we die.

So Tommy Sheridan lied to screw twenty grand out of Rupert Murdoch! Well good on him. As a practising Christian (ie practising every day in the hope I’ll get it right eventually) I say that if you’re not prepared to lie and break any or all of the commandments to help establish the Kingdom on earth, then you’re just playing at being a revolutionary and there is no health in you.

Correction:- it’s £200 grand
He didn’t just lie himself, he asked a gang of his friends to lie for him.

baldricsaid,

Karl,understand where you are coming from,yet for the leader of a political belief encompassing social equality for all, has to be squeeky clean, not only fiscal but also moral,as past socialists governments ended up doing the same as the ones they over threw.